Business Development Services – DCED Guiding Principles

Guiding principles for donor intervention in business development services

The BDS Working Group organised five Conferences between 1998 and 2000, leading to the publication of the Guiding Principles (“Blue Book”) in 2001. That document can be downloaded from the links below, in eight languages.

Links to the original BDS conferences

Many other BDS cases and documents can be found on the DCED inter-agency database at www.BDSKnowledge.org (which also contains a lot of materials on value chain development, making markets work for the poor etc.)

Follow-up work building on the BDS guiding principles

In recent years, much work has been undertaken building on and further developing the BDS Guiding Principles. This includes the Making Markets work for the Poor (M4P) approach; resources on the approach can be viewed on the dedicated DCED knowledge page. With the view to cover these and other developments, USAID has pulled together best practices for value chain development projects in 2010.